'From Kim Scott, two-times winner of the Miles Franklin Literary Award, comes a work charged with ambition and poetry, in equal parts brutal, mysterious and idealistic, about a young woman cast into a drama that has been playing for over two hundred years ...
'Taboo takes place in the present day, in the rural South-West of Western Australia, and tells the story of a group of Noongar people who revisit, for the first time in many decades, a taboo place: the site of a massacre that followed the assassination, by these Noongar's descendants, of a white man who had stolen a black woman. They come at the invitation of Dan Horton, the elderly owner of the farm on which the massacres unfolded. He hopes that by hosting the group he will satisfy his wife's dying wishes and cleanse some moral stain from the ground on which he and his family have lived for generations.
'But the sins of the past will not be so easily expunged.
'We walk with the ragtag group through this taboo country and note in them glimmers of re-connection with language, lore, country. We learn alongside them how countless generations of Noongar may have lived in ideal rapport with the land. This is a novel of survival and renewal, as much as destruction; and, ultimately, of hope as much as despair.' (Publication summary)
To Ryan Brown, ngan ngoon
'Engagements with walking, wandering, roaming the land are not new to Australian writers or filmmakers. A recognition of ambulation as discursive, as world-making, continues today: “First you have to learn to walk,” announces Stephen Muecke in a new book, co-authored with Paddy Roe, on learning how to move on Country. Muecke’s teachers and guides are Indigenous knowledge-holders; he walks only in their footsteps. But in post-Mabo narratives more generally, whose lands are being walked on? Whose worlds are being made as mobility is performed? This essay examines the trope of roaming and of the foot in contemporary Australian Indigenous-authored narratives, wherein walking or mobility in story invokes not only a connection to Country but an enactment of law making and an assertion of Indigenous sovereignty. In a seminal speech in Adelaide in 2003, Indigenous legal philosopher Irene Watson asked “Are we Free to Roam?” Watson asserted the freedom to walk, “to sing and to live with the land of [one’s] ancestors” as a measure of the attainment of Indigenous sovereignty. She called for Aboriginal voices to look “beyond the limited horizon” of the time towards a moment and place of sovereignty. I argue that these voices have now emerged. Beginning with an examination of Ivan Sen’s film Beneath Clouds (2002), I then examine walking and movement in a selection of more recent Indigenous-authored novels (by Alexis Wright, Kim Scott and Julie Janson) and film (by Richard J. Frankland), as well as in new legal thinking which suggests that law-walking might be more prevalent in Australia than previously known.' (Publication abstract)
'It has been widely argued that a ‘culture of agreement making’ as an alternative to litigation in native title and other areas of political and legal activity emerged in Australia in the early 2000s (Langton and Palmer). This paper explores the ways in which this development has been taken up in post-Mabo fiction. It begins by surveying the debates around the possibilities and limitations of current frameworks of agreement-making, especially their ability to deliver “equitable outcomes for Indigenous parties” (Langton and Palmer 1), and the endemic inequality produced by settler colonialism. It then examines four novels which include agreements between white and Aboriginal characters in the light of these debates: Peter Goldsworthy’s Three Dog Night (2003), Jessica White’s Entitlement (2012), Melissa Lucashenko’s Mullumbimby (2013) and Kim Scott’s Taboo (2017). Three Dog Night highlights the politics of cross-cultural negotiation in a narrative marked by transgressive desire and the blurring of normative boundaries. In Entitlement an imaginative revisioning of the process of bargaining reverses the usual power imbalance between Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal characters such that the former secure their ‘entitlements,’ making visible the presence of inequity in the contractual scene. Mullumbimby explores the conflict generated by native title litigation in Aboriginal communities, but also explores modes of resolving or pre-empting such discord through agreement. Taboo displaces a settler Australian desire for ‘reconciliation’ with a Noongar emphasis on ‘reconstitution’ (109), tracing the emergence of a tentative agreement-making project within a context of incremental acknowledgments of the traumatic effects of modern repetitions of colonial violence. In all four narratives a residue of unresolved conflict suggests a cautious, critical engagement with the ‘culture of agreement-making.’' (Publication abstract)
'Kim Scott's Taboo is a story about beginnings and endings.This novel reminds the reader of the circularity of stories, and how those stories are shaped by intent and weighed by landscape. Scott speaks of dispossession, abuse, colonialism, addiction and racism in lyrical and melancholy prose. The men and women who walk through these pages are startlingly aware of their failings and equally forgiving of those failings in others. There are no quick fixes and the story vacillates between despair and hope. Yet this is not a grim story. The lucidity of its prose lifts it beyond the despair in its pages and reminds us that there are no perfect words and no easy resolutions to the trials of our First Nations people. An important and devastating story for our times.' (Publication abstract)
'Land theft, language suppression, cultural genocide. These forms of abuse are the historical background that feature in the story of Taboo, the latest work of fiction by the writer Kim Scott. Taboo is a story of trauma, decolonization, and healing. The main character, Tilly Coolman, must reconcile her recent discovery about her Noongar Aboriginal roots as she meets her biological father and his family, along with healing from horrific abuse from the people closest to her. Additionally, the novel draws attention to the descendants of white settlers who attempt to address their own culpability. The novel centers around the creation of a "Peace Park" being set up near the site of a massacre in order to bring reconciliation between the Wirlomin Noongar and the white population of the area. The story of Tilly, whose heritage is of mixed Wirlomin Noongar heritage, reflects a long history of abuse suffered by the Aboriginal peoples of Australia and by many indigenous groups from colonized countries worldwide.' (Introduction)
'Some of the most exciting, tonally ambitious and uncompromising fiction that has been published in Australia in recent years has come from Aboriginal authors – most notably, the remarkable Waanyi writer Alexis Wright and the extraordinary Noongar writer Kim Scott. A new novel from the multi-award-winning Scott is something to take seriously. ' (Introduction)
'When a new novel from Kim Scott appears, one feels compelled to talk not only about it as a work of fiction by a leading Australian writer, but also about its cultural significance. In this sense a Kim Scott novel is an event, and Taboo does not disappoint.' (Introduction)
'With ‘Taboo’, Kim Scott sketches out a new way of accepting our histories, and imagining our future.
'These days the release of a new Kim Scott novel feels like a literary event. It wasn’t always this way. His first two books, True Country (1993) and Benang (1999), established him more as a writer’s writer: a brilliant, if raw, voice calling to us from across the Nullarbor. But with his previous book, the gobsmacking That Deadman Dance (2010), Scott announced himself as the country’s most important novelist.
'It was a book that took a fresh look at Australia’s past. We had the typical scenes of first contact as white settlers arrived in Albany and began to alienate Aboriginal land, yet in Scott’s telling this didn’t devolve into violence.' (Introduction)
